


metamorpheus

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Chameleon Arch, Dr Nyarlathotep, Gen, Memory Loss, Mild Identity Horror, read that first!!!! its good!!!!!, that sure is a term i just made up, this is a side-story / alt pov to a longer fic!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-27 01:58:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15675735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: alternate perspective of 'so you aren't as human as you thought you were,' chapter five, 'cambiare'—which is to say, john smith goes to bed with a headache and wakes up with two hearts, and has one motherfucker of an existential crisis along the way. not to mention some very, very weird dreams.





	metamorpheus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [timeisweird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeisweird/gifts).
  * Inspired by [so you aren't as human as you thought you were](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15208397) by [timeisweird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeisweird/pseuds/timeisweird). 



> note that this was written, technically, before the tupperware chapter it connects to, so there's some weird little discrepancies, but to be perfectly honest i'm too lazy to edit them out. anyway,

Meanwhile, John is seeing things.

He’s made himself some tea, hoping that it might soothe the raw buzz running up and down his spine, but for once it doesn’t seem to be helping. There’s a dull pain still ringing in his skull, and it’s steadily moving past what he can excuse as the usual stress-headache—turning into something more, something that burns his throat and turns his stomach and bleaches the world an inexplicable unpleasant grey. Everything feels—

disconnected, dislocated, like disassociation but not quite. There’s the numb strange sense of cotton wool in his ears, of looking at the world with the contrast turned all the way down, and he’s always hated cotton wool. Even the  _ tea  _ tastes funny. Something like tannin, and free radicals, and—January? 

He considers the thought for a moment, more than a little baffled, but thinking about it just makes the headache worse and so he gives up; sets the tea back on the counter, sighing.  

Frowns, pressing the back of his own hand absently against his forehead. Does he have a fever? He can’t have a  _ fever.  _ He really  _ hopes  _ he doesn’t have a fever. He has work tomorrow, and he’d been wanting to finish that essay tonight, and there’s a million other projects in the basement waiting for him. He picks up the tea again, takes a vaguely hopeful sip, but it only makes him feel sicker. 

Well. Damn.

And there’s still that flicker at the edge of his vision.

A blink, and he’s half-turned to look after it, except that he recognizes as soon as he’s moving that he’s turning in the wrong direction—that he’s turning left, and it wasn’t to the left at all, of course it wasn’t, it was something else. A different—direction. He saw it and he knows where he saw it and yet he can’t quite seem to  _ look  _ at it, a contradiction in terms that racks up the pain in his head another couple notches. 

There  _ was  _ something there. He’s sure of it. A spark of light like—iron, and saltwater, and chocolate, except not the sweet butter chocolate but the  _ real  _ stuff, hot cocoa brewed in a white-stone city built on a jungle lake, where the hot  _ comes  _ from hot peppers, ancient and dark and strange. 

John blinks. Shakes his head, mystified, or maybe just trying to get that cotton-wool fog out of his head. God, he really is seeing things, isn’t he? Oh well. Everyone’s always told him he was mad, it was a matter of time, really, ha ha. 

No—there is is again, just for a moment, his train of through derailing abruptly to follow it, stuttering in the air for a half-real instant before time starts moving again. He inhales sharply, and then coughs, the buzz catching at the back of his throat—well, hell, maybe he really  _ is  _ coming down with something. 

No, except he’s not  _ seeing  _ things, precisely. It’s not sight at all, any more than it’s smell or taste or hearing or anything else he can seem to identify. And still there’s something  _ there.  _

He stares at his tea, rubs a hand on the back of his neck uneasily. There’s a vibration in his bones now, a disorienting syncopated beat so vivid he can almost hear it; like a heartbeat, almost, but doubled. A distant whine ringing somewhere.  The indistinct and horrible sense that everything’s warping around him, that the world is moving past him at a blurred crazy hundred miles per hour, concepts he can’t make sense of dancing through his head to music he can’t hear. The taste of January. January twenty-seventh, human era two thousand and four,  _ that’s  _ it, that little pop of cinnamon and cedar, that’s—

No. Hang on.

What is he  _ talking  _ about?

John raises his eyebrows and backs up, running his hand through his hair bemusedly. He’s far too sober for this. People keep telling him how incomprehensible he gets; he didn’t think he’d go so far as to bewilder  _ himself.  _ Christ, how long has he been standing here staring at a mug of tea?  

…Maybe he needs some sleep. Donna’s voice in his ear:  _ as if you ever don’t.  _ He yawns, grabs the mug, and heads for the living room.

He’d probably intended to turn the telly on at some point. It’s what he usually does, late at night, watch something mindless and uninteresting in the hope that it’ll quiet down his brain a little, but this time he doesn’t end up needing the help. There’s a dull sudden exhaustion in his bones, weighing him down, and by the time he’s curled up underneath the blanket on the sofa he doesn’t think he could move at all. 

He’s always tired. He never sleeps enough, too busy reading or experimenting or just walking around in circles halfway into the night, and he knows it, people have told him enough times it’s not healthy, but it’s not like he can  _ help  _ it. Not when the whirlwind of thought in his head won’t stop long enough to let him sit still, let alone fall asleep. He’s always tired, he’s used to that, but this is different—silent and ancient and massive as glacier ice; dragging his eyes shut.

He wants to sleep for a thousand slow, heavy, hungry years. Until the building collapses around him. Until they lock him in a silver coffin and build a glass castle around it and then let the roses and the briars grow wild, thorns digging into the crystal spires, eating away at the sunlight bite by patient bite, until finally they close over the last diamond rooftop a thousand feet above, and leave him in the dark.

* * *

 

John sleeps.

He dreams of –

what  _ does  _ he dream?

indistinct spectres of light and dark, black and white, the tripartite goddess  _ time _ and  _ death _ and  _ pain _ .

_ i was your champion, _ the nameless being that is not john says to time, and she says:  _ you were, _ and they feel something that has no human name but may be analogous to guilt.  _ i was never your champion, _ they say to death, and she says:  _ i offered,  _ and that is true, but they turned that offer down, all those unreal years ago.  _ i never meant to be your champion, _ they say to pain, and she smiles—death’s smile is made of scissors, and time’s of knitting-needles, but pain’s smile is like knives—and she says:  _ as if any of us ever had a choice. _

and that too is true.

(memories—scattered—truths, past and future, that he cannot yet access—

layered boxes in his head. human inside more-than-human inside never-human-at-all. the god and the mortal and the other one. at least one of them is screaming.)

_i am afraid i am falling to pieces,_ says the entity that is in some sense john. _i am afraid that i am changing._

_ what did you expect? _ pain responds.  _ my sister is the fabric of existence. my other sister is the cessation thereof. they are balanced, too balanced; without me they freeze, dead-locked, and all all that ever was freezes with them. i am change. i am the thing that allows either of them to mean anything. it is the nature of the thing. i am change, and change hurts. _

_ does it hurt you? _ asks john, surprisingly reasonably, considering that he is being torn apart.

_ i do not  _ feel _ pain _ , she tells them. _ i  _ am _ pain. it is simple. _

_ is there a difference? _ he tries.

_ no, _ she says,  _ but you knew that already. _

and she is gone.

* * *

 

John wakes up, and for a surprisingly long moment he feels absolutely fine.

In fact, he feels more than fine—he feels better than he has in  _ weeks.  _ Certainly he doesn’t feel sick anymore. He doesn’t feel hungry, or thirsty, there’s no need-caffeine whine in his teeth, the buzz at the base of his skull is silent. He isn’t even  _ tired. _

And that alone, before he can think anything at all, is enough to tell him that something is truly and terribly wrong. 

Reaction is instant. (Faster than it should be, faster than he should be  _ capable  _ of.) His eyes snap open, push-pulling himself into a sitting position on the old sofa in one disoriented motion, the world around him a formless mass of disconnected shapes and colours. The shape right in front of him abruptly resolves into an open-mouthed Donna Noble. Remote held in one hand. The television set flickering mindless and forgotten at the far wall. She’s looking at him. She’s saying something.

“ _ Finally _ ,” she says, stabs out a finger at his chest half-accusingly. “What did you  _ do  _ last night, John? I’ve been trying to wake you up all  _ morning.  _ And you best believe I had other things planned today than watching EastEnders and worry about your skinny catatonic arse—"

Her words warp. So does everything else.

It’s not that he loses the ability to  _ hear  _ them, as much as he loses the ability to  _ process  _ them, but the difference is academic or might as well be. He can no longer listen.

The problem is not that his head is foggy—in fact it’s not, last night’s inexplicable low-contrast static disappeared entirely—but rather that it’s clear,  _ too  _ clear. He’s awake, now, in his diamond citadel, the briars gone and the sun shining in through the glass, but he finds suddenly that he preferred the roses and the thorns, because now he can  _ see. _ Because now the sunlight beats down unhindered, reflecting and refracting and amplifying through every crystal facet, the heat rising. Because now he’s free of the darkness, but instead of being lord of a diamond kingdom he is the ant trapped at the centre of a temple of magnifying glasses, and he can feel himself beginning to burn.

(Burn. Heat, fire, flame, spark, electricity, artron-gold – )

This, incidentally, is the exact room temperature: twenty-five point three degrees Celsius. This is his own exact internal temperature: fifteen point seven degrees Celsius. This is the exact local time, as he tastes it in the air (saltwater and chocolatl and irony:) thirteenth of september, year two thousand and eight,, fifteen o’clock and forty-two minutes and seventeen point oh five seconds. The universe is a collapsing construction, a series of arguably unrelated points on a fraying line, and he can taste that too, the bitter snap and pop of paradox, the awful toneless grey of a fixed-point, the static-laced roar of anti-time sometime in the middle distance.

He doesn’t understand. Not the information nor the concepts inherent in the information nor the methods by which he obtained either. He cannot understand. There is too much of it and not enough of him and it hurts and yet it keeps coming, and it feels like drowning—like going under for the last time _ ,  _ and in some sense that’s fitting, given that he’s not entirely sure he’s breathing.  

“Are you all right?” Donna begins to ask somewhere in the noise, her usual brashness fading away into real concern, but to him in that moment as they look up she glows with silver strings of light echoing back from directions he has no concept for and as she moves forward to touch him a hundred thousand alternates and parallels and lives-that-never-happened move  _ with  _ her, layered above and over and behind her, a mess of lies and lines and symbols, and what’s worse ( _ far  _ worse) is that some of them  _ don’t _ —whole realities of Donna split off where she’s somewhere else or still or dead or never existed at all and he sees all of those  _ too _ —

and this time, as time moves forward (past to future, event one to event two, the worldline of creation) he  _ feels  _ it disappear, a sickening lurch like the carpet of the entire universe sliding out from under him, a solid golden-artron instant gone and yet not gone and yet not solid and infinitely changeable and infinitely changing—

John chokes on a scream and shuts down.

* * *

 

For a while, that’s all: the noise, and the darkness.

The sound and the fury.  

* * *

 

Here’s the important thing to understand: Life is nonsense.

They say that madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And technically speaking, this may well be true, but practically it’s absolutely meaningless. That’s not madness. That’s reality, and provably so: think of every time you’ve ever thrown a pair of dice.

Was that the same results, each time? 

Wasn’t that madness? 

Life is nonsense. The universe started in Chaos, and it will inevitably return there—the logician’s era is a limited one, must by its very nature be a limited one, because only the logician would ever have the audacity to assign reality anything as simple as a  _ beginning  _ or  _ end.  _ The Carnival Queen reigned before the Watchmakers did and when the last of them has fallen She will return again, consume their petty Web of Time and melt their Spiral Politic, their high-and-mighty concepts and complexes, their static truths and facts and measurements. Order could never be as powerful as Chaos was and will be, because Order must by its nature define and calcify its own strengths and weaknesses, whereas Chaos has no such obligation toward consistency. The reality we find ourselves in, in the meantime, is nothing but a momentary diversion, a mutation in the flow—a universe in absolute flux must, it’s true, occasionally also become orderly, but there’s no obligation for it to  _ stay _ that way. The Pythia  _ will _ rise again.

To think otherwise is sheer arrogance. To think it’s even  _ possible  _ to do the same thing over and over again, in the confusion of perhaps and probably and may-have-been that is our world, is sheer arrogance. It may well be true _ ,  _ oh yes, but only the Watchmakers believe in truth. It may well be madness, but then our reality is as mad as we are.

Why are we so opposed to madness?

There are so many truths, now, so many facts, so many things that have been defined and labelled and pinned down like butterflies behind glass. What’s a little ambiguity every once in a while? What’s a little impossibility? Chaos isn’t meaningless, after all; Chaos is meaning in its  _ purest  _ sense, is a world where symbolism is not held back by plausibility. Chaos is the lines between dream and reality erased, and what’s the horror in that?

Nearly everything can be  _ known,  _ in this world of ours, can be tied into meaningless rows of numbers on a page. Could we survive without a little bit of fairy tale?

And somewhere in the storm of random numbers that threatens to swallow him whole, sudden, inexplicable, John finds it.

A beat. A rhythm. The rhyme within the reason. Sometimes a little madness is all that keeps you from falling apart, you see; sometimes it’s just that little contradictory spark at the base of your throat that sees certain death, a situation that logically cannot end in any way but failure, and says  _ how about we don’t. _

_ How about we survive, instead.  Just this once. Just for fun. How about just keep running, and  _ sod _ the certainty. _

This is what he hears: the double-beat of hearts.

(One-two-three-four.)

_ Two  _ heartbeats, he realizes, somewhere in the storm. Two hearts. Humans don’t have two hearts. The conclusion is numb and distant, but it is clear: he isn’t human. (Not anymore.)

Not human. Time and Death and Pain. The Pythia and the Watchmakers. There’s a lot he has to process and no way to process it, and so he doesn’t, and he accepts the contradiction with a familiarity that might disturb him if he had any way to think about it. Several internal alarm systems try to tell him it’s impossible at once and he ignores all of them. He’s never been very good at listening to authority, that way.

And then, suddenly, the mess of colour and sound and light around him resolves—forming itself, again, into the living room of his flat, the television now turned off, the blinds closed, and for some reason he can still see perfectly in the half-darkness but at least everything isn’t quite as agonizingly  _ clear  _ anymore. And there’s Donna, face arranged into something he doesn’t recognize in that moment but which is probably worry. And he’s mostly John again, curled up on the battered couch, shaking like a leaf in wind. 

But this at least he recognizes—the way the light and the darkness stab into his eyes in equal measure, the confusion and the suffocation and the need for everything to just  _ stop.  _ Even if there’s several more dimensions to it than there has ever been before. He knows this. He’s not thinking very much, but he can at least find Donna’s face and the hum of her voice even if neither really mean much to him at the moment.

There’s. They. He. (Wants to curl up so tight he disappears, like a slip-knot pulled tight.) (Wants to not feel.) There are ways to get out of that tightening spiral of thought and he knows them and he only needs to somehow balance the sizable chunk of his mind that is occupied simply with not disintegrating and still be able to remember (but what’s an alien brain good for if not to run a couple thought-tracks at once) and (too much) but

Last night’s blanket is still half tucked around him and the clean softness of it that he usually likes so much is suddenly far too soft, like fingernails against a blackboard inside his skin, a horrific whining tone that won’t stop echoing back-and-forth along his spine, and he hates it more than he has ever hated anything, and then he knows.

He isn’t looking at Donna, because he can’t, but he opens his mouth no matter how much the words hurt and whispers (because whispering is at least better than letting the air down his throat where it buzzes and burns inside his lungs) (or does he even have lungs now?) “There’s a weighted blanket in the upstairs closet top left  _ please. _ ”

Donna says something, and then she’s moving. He can’t move, because then the blanket will catch against his skin and the carefully built house of cards that is his consciousness will collapse and he’ll be drowning in the noise again, but nonetheless he is grateful.

Time passes.

(He could tell you how much, down to the microsecond, as exact as you like—he knows he could—except that would be giving up.)

And then she’s back. 

(To her credit, she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at him, doesn’t add another line of input to what is already far too much to deal with, and he’s not sure how she knows that’s what he needs but he’s glad; he’s so very glad, and so very grateful.)

And then the blanket—he reaches out for it without thinking, and she’s just sort of draped it over him awkwardly but he pulls it all the way over his head, finally managing to move, curling in under the comforting crushing weight of it. It’s like it  _ should  _ be. It’s something he knows, something he can deal with, digging his fingernails into the cloth instead of into his own palms. Eyes closed, barely breathing, the darkness so absolute he can almost pretend he can’t still see the silver lines of timelines moving beneath the skin.

Almost. And sometimes almost is good enough.

The darkness, and the noise, but now the dark is stronger; bleeding across the back of his eyelids, silence slowly drowning out the roar in his head. Running on almost. (He’s always been good at that.)  

At length he starts to be able to think again. 

He’s still not really breathing, he doesn’t think, but he gets the sudden disconcerting sense that he doesn’t really  _ need  _ to. Somehow he’s managed to make all the lights he shouldn’t see retreat, a little, to make them that bit easier to ignore. 

He’s alive. He is in the here, in the now. His name is John Smith. He isn’t human. 

He opens his eyes, very slowly, and somehow the house of cards holds. Looks up, and takes a breath—

And finds Donna Noble, sitting on the very end of the couch, still very carefully not looking at him.

“What,” she whispers, somehow managing to be as forceful as ever even when the words are barely breathed, “the  _ hell  _ was that.” 

It takes him a surprisingly long moment to remember how to smile, but then he does, weak but genuine—and now that the sheer overload’s out of the way he realizes the  _ impossibility  _ of it all, the sheer ridiculousness of waking up one morning with two hearts beating where there used to be one. Ah. This one’s going to take some explaining, isn’t it. 

He offers her the smile, somehow keeping the shock and the uncertainty and the strangeness of it all balanced in his chest, a precariously functional arrangement that nonetheless is all that's keeping him from falling apart. “Er. Good question?”

**Author's Note:**

> i _almost _named this after an Ovid quote but then i decided that was too pretentious even for me, so now you get a pun instead. in bad greek. look, i wish i knew what the fuck i thought i was doing as much as anyone else, alright?__


End file.
